In Full Bloom: Days of Daisy (2022)
Plot lines about women wanting babies are as old as time, and can easily degenerate into sexist tropes. Daisy’s desire to have a kid doesn’t define her. Instead, over the[…]
Tagged: movie
Drama · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
Two Perspectives on Sainthood in 1951: Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51 and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair
Graham Greene could be a very political writer (nowhere more than in The Quiet American, which was his next major work after The End of the Affair), but Christianity has[…]
Celebrity Culture · Counterculture · Music & Musicals · Production History · Societal Trends · Youth
How the Monkees Birthed New Hollywood
A rewatch benumbed to this flash and flare reveals the stark morbidity of Head. Throughout the movie the Monkees are assaulted, hunted, and caged. Words fail, fists fail. The film[…]
Directors · Gender · Hollywood · Horror · Men & Masculinity
The Jaws of War: How Quint Decodes Masculinity in the Films of Spielberg
If the sum of Spielberg’s work is about how men live in the world, Jaws is his most particular point on the subject, a film centered with almost fantastical totality[…]
Franchises & Series · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy · Societal Trends
The Batman, the Grand Appeaser: Repressive Desublimation, Foucault, and False Hope
The Batman (2022) fulfills complex, necessary roles in society. The intricate power relations of the film, as a part of mass media, are directly related to those in the spectacle[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Muslims
Dispatch from Tribeca #2 (2022): Stranger at the Gate and An Act of Worship
Stranger at the Gate is sharp, and benefits from a tense and credible narrative. It’s constructed like a bomb – a heavy orb with a lit fuse, carefully and reassuringly[…]
Myth and Archetype · SF & Fantasy
Touched by an Angel (of Death): Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm and the Visionary Ideal
“Look at the stars,” the genius of Trumbull’s movie finally seems to be saying, but also know the stars within. * * * Often, it’s the throwaway scenes that click.[…]
Activist & Political · Comedy · Counterculture · Experimental & Underground
Laughing at Ourselves: On William Klein’s Mr. Freedom (1969)
This is an excerpt from the introduction to the author’s new book on Mr. Freedom (https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/isbn/9781800856943/). * * * The film calls into question both the American international and domestic[…]
Covid-19 · Digital · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Pandemic · Societal Trends · TV & Streaming · Videos
Dispatch from Tribeca #1 (2022): The YouTube Effect
YouTube is a global idea farm, not unlike Big Agriculture: welcome, user, to your pre-fab silo, built “just for you” by YouTube’s secret algorithm. That algorithm loads about 70% of[…]
“No Viking Atheists”: The Northman’s Journey into Old World Belief
In my theater’s showing, the instant that Fjölnir lost his head in the climactic volcano battle, an elderly woman left her seat, lingering at the door a moment before exiting.[…]
Experimental & Underground · Horror · New Media · Societal Trends · Theory · Thrillers & Action · TV & Streaming
A Spectre in the Participatory Panopticon: The Database Horror of Unfriended: Dark Web
The encounter between the lead characters and The Circle evokes a wider sense of anxiety regarding the extent to which we upload information about every area of our lives into[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals
Under Bloodless Skies: U2 Live at Red Rocks after 40
Their performance isn’t marked by precision or technical mastery. It’s an onrush of unbridled enthusiasm all the way through – a frenzied, joyous romp that treats the show as if[…]
Family · Horror · Women in Film
Home Wee Home – It’s Where the Horror Is: Miniature Models, Crime Scenes, and Toxic Femininity in Hereditary and Sharp Objects
A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. – Sylvia Plath, “The Applicant” (Oct. 11, 1962) And they stuck me together[…]
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
“The Best Jewish Cowboy”: An Interview with James Caan
“Hard times will make a monkey eatred peppers.”
Historical & Epic · Medieval · Women in Film
Medieval Arthuriana Was Always Scary, but Not in the Way You’d Think: On Sir Gawain and The Green Knight
The adaptation is successful not just in its understanding of how irreverent and illogical the narrative space of medieval romance is and always has been, but also in how it[…]
Animation · Asian · Communism and Socialism
Monster in the Machine: Monstrosity and Marxism in Spirited Away
The gold that No-Face dispenses to the workers later crumbles into a pile of dirt. Conjured from nothing, No-Face’s fabricated currency undermines the very system of profit that capitalism is[…]
Experimental & Underground · Mystery · New Media
Memoria: An Existential Wake-Up Call from Film’s Possible Future
Apichatpong’s film is the bang in the night that has the power to shock us out of convention, to help us open our eyes and ears to the rich and[…]
The New Old West Side Story
The Sharks and Jets may have been initially inspired by Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues, but the gang members we see are really first cousins of the “troubled youth” in popular[…]
Film Noir, Bête Blanche: Blood on the Snow in Fargo
The horror in this film is not the noir violence that it brings to the bucolic Midwestern setting, but the inability of that violence to leave a mark – the[…]
Billy Wilder’s “Home Run with the Bases Loaded”: Some Keys to The Apartment
In the corporate world the film depicts, the lower-level executives are small-time Lotharios who seek no more than sex from female underlings. Their boss, however, battens on the love he[…]
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